


know that body (like it's mine)

by singsongsung



Category: Dublin Murder Squad Series - Tana French, Dublin Murders (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:49:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 16,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22865092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singsongsung/pseuds/singsongsung
Summary: They’re three weeks into their partnership when Rob first sees a uniform flirt with Cassie.Rob cockblocks Cassie for reasons that definitely aren't romantic. Cassie cockblocks herself for reasons she won't examine. They screw themselves, and they screw each other.
Relationships: Cassie Maddox/Rob Ryan
Comments: 16
Kudos: 44





	1. Rob

**Author's Note:**

> Set pre- _In the Woods_. 
> 
> There are murders mentioned in this fic, including the murders of children. 
> 
> Title from Taylor Swift's "I Think He Knows."
> 
> If you read, I'd be delighted to hear your thoughts in the comments! I love talking about these doomed idiots.

_i know there’s no form and no labels to put on_  
_to this thing we keep and dip into when we need_  
_and i don’t have the right to ask where you go at night_  
_but the waves hit my head, to think someone’s in your bed_

_i get a little bit genghis khan_  
_don’t want you to get it on_  
_with nobody else but me_  
_with nobody else but me_

\- miike snow, “genghis khan”

They’re three weeks into their partnership when Rob first sees a uniform flirt with Cassie. They’re working the night shift like good little rookies. A man is dead. His wife is hysterical, her wails flying high and unrestrained into the depths of the dark sky. She’s in the back of a Garda patrol car, and Cassie and the uniform are leaning down at her side, trying to get a shred of useful information from her. Rob sees what the uniform must see: the way each flash of the car’s blue lights seems to illuminate a fragment of Cassie’s face, rendering it picture-perfect, turning each piece of her individually, exquisitely beautiful. Her eyebrow a smooth, unfaltering arch; the smattering of freckles near her jaw like a constellation; the gathering of her lips, which look white beneath the light, before she speaks. 

Rob’s first ridiculous, affronted thought, watching the way the uniform looks at Maddox, is: _I’m right here._

And then he remembers, because it appears that some corner of his mind managed to forget, that he’s not Cassie’s boyfriend. He’s her partner. 

She doesn’t look uncomfortable - she’s mostly ignoring the uniform, who’s making a big show of his gallantry and kindness and continually checking out of the corner of his eye to see if she's noticed. She’s got a sympathetic face turned toward the widow, whose shrieks have quieted a decibel or two. It’s entirely obvious to Rob that Cassie doesn’t need rescuing from this situation, but still, he feels wholeheartedly tired of watching it. They’re not going to get anywhere with the wife until the family liaison has arrived, anyway. 

He puts his hand on her shoulder. It’s a stifling summer night, and her skin is hot even through her cotton blazer. Her eyes flick in his direction instantaneously, and he gives his head a fraction of a tilt, lets the line of his mouth flatten out. 

She straightens up, his hand falling from her shoulder, skimming very briefly against her upper arm. She doesn’t pay any mind to the uniform’s look of alarm that he’s being left alone on comfort-the-family duty, just follows Rob a few feet away, pushing her hair back from her face. 

“Thinking she won’t be much good to us until the family liaison can have a go at calming her down?” she asks, when they’re out of the wife’s earshot. 

Rob nods. He tries to look grim - someone is dead, after all - but his mind is racing, searching for every possible loose thread they might pull on, and he knows Cassie’s is doing the same. 

“It’s real, I think,” she says softly. “The shock. She’s stunned.” 

He nods again. Some part of him wants to touch her elbow, so he does, just a quick grasp, not meant to bolster but meant to say _I hear you_. She’s sharp-elbowed, her bone jabbing at him even in that quick gesture. Cassie’s sharp in so many ways, not soft the way the others on the squad assume she is. They’d roll their eyes at what she’d just said, dismiss her words and smirk behind her back at her womanly _feelings_. They don’t like Cassie, which is absurd, because Cassie emanates likability, even to someone mildly misanthropic like Rob, and because he’s right next to her full of so many things to hate: his tailored suits, a face that’s been called smug more than once, his English accent. 

What Rob knows, what the rest of Murder has yet to figure out, is that Cassie isn’t telling him her feelings. She’s telling him what she’s observed, what she’s found to be true. She’s giving him something, a piece of information that could be just as valuable as a bloody fingerprint, and he knows to listen. 

“Walk through the scene again?” he proposes. “See if the techs have anything to tell us?” 

Cassie nods, pulling a pair of gloves out of the right-side pocket of her blazer. Rob keeps his gloves in the same place in his jacket, and he grabs two as well. Her eyes do one long, broad sweep of the street, cataloging its details, and then she heads toward the house. He’s right on her heel, his own eyes probing every corner of the dark street, taking a mental snapshot for later, when they’ll compare notes. 

They return to Dublin Castle as morning is starting to creep in on the night, they sky not quite so black, a deep bluish hue taking over. They have two viable lines of inquiry, two suspects to question. O’Kelly isn’t in yet, so before they run over the verbal report they’ll deliver to him, they slip back outside for a smoke, leaning comfortably against their favourite stone wall. 

Despite the early hour, it’s hot, the day building its way to a scorching kind of heat. They both left their jackets in the squad room, and their sleeves are rolled up to their elbows. Cassie’s undone an extra button on her shirt, and Rob can see a faint sheen of sweat on her collarbones. 

Rob takes a long drag of his cigarette and then drops his hand to his side, shifting his back against the wall. His shoulder is aching, subtly. “That uniform,” he says. 

Cassie’s eyes drift over to him, heavy-lidded. Sometimes, when they’re alone toward the ends of their shifts, he wonders what she looks like when she wakes up in the morning. “What about him?”

He shoots her a skeptical look. “He was into you.” 

She snorts. 

After a long moment that still feels too short, they drop their cigarettes to the ground in near unison and stamp them out. They go back inside. 

They have a solve on that case two days later, working right through another night, Cassie immobile in her chair, arms crossed loosely over her chest, staring Suspect #1 down, while Rob paces behind him until sweat starts to gather along his receding hairline. He crumples as he confesses, his forehead almost on the table. Cassie stays right where she is, a touchstone for their weeping murderer, who hadn’t meant to leave those kids without a da, honest, he hadn’t. Her eyes dart up to Rob’s face only once, and he sees the gleam of victory burst and fade in her irises. 

It’s after that solve, paperwork submitted before six a.m., at Cassie’s flat, that Rob tells her. They’re sharing a celebratory drink as most of Dublin bustles off to work, the early morning sun falling through the flat’s windows, and he tells her about Knocknaree. He tells her about the woods. 

When he’s finished, he lacks the courage to look at her face. Even a glimpse, rapidly suppressed, of shock or pity in her eyes would undo him, unravel the careful construction of Detective Rob Ryan and leave only little Adam in the wreckage. 

Cassie reaches across the space between them on the sofa and takes his hand. It’s not something she’s ever done before; there’s never been any occasion to. The contact, more familiar than any they’ve had thus far in their partnership, feels like a jolt through his body’s core. Cassie’s skin is soft, save for a cracked knuckle and a couple half-formed calluses. Her fingers twine between his: a slow, purposeful weave. She squeezes their palms together and angles her head, finds his eyes with hers and looks directly into them. 

Then she tips her chin toward his empty glass, and when Rob nods, she reaches for the bottle of whiskey and gives him a generous refill. He gulps down a mouthful immediately. 

They drink in an easy silence for a long time, her hand still wrapped up with his. The sun climbs higher and higher and higher, up past the edges of Cassie’s windows. 

All she says, a long while later, is, “Thank you for telling me.”

“Screwing your partner yet, Ryan?” is the constant refrain of a couple guys on the squad, faces that weren’t exactly appealing to begin with made ugly by lecherous grins. Rob’s tried a variety of responses: ignoring them, lifting his middle finger, rolling his eyes in a way that conveys the sheer stupidity of the question, wry and biting comments like, _you must be in quite a dry spell if you spend your work days thinking about sex when that woman’s/that boy’s/that nice granny’s murderer is out walking the streets._ They’re undeterred, demanding, “Is she not into you, then? Has Murder got its first lesbian?”

Cassie does a fair amount of her own eye-rolling at it all, the lazy kind that shows she knows those idiots aren’t even worth the eyeball workout. “Bit ironic that they think I’m gay,” she says once, combing through a vic’s incoming and outgoing calls. “Since they’re the ones convinced you’re so pretty no straight woman could control herself.” 

Rob shoots her a wounded look at this assessment of his appearance, and Cassie grins at him. Her real, honest smile always crinkles her nose. 

He’s not screwing his partner. What he’s doing with his partner is something the morons who are convinced it’s still funny to ask him about it could never understand. He’s lifting her layers, slow and sure, and letting her explore his in turn, to poke at the places inside him he usually keeps locked up. He’s sinking into the kind of friendship with Cassie that he’d never even thought of before, never imagined, not since he left the woods with his shirt slashed open and no marks on his skin. His very being is learning all the arches and hollows of hers, shaping itself, discovering where to be convex, where to be concave, until the fringes of his existence are aligned with the contours of hers. 

He watches her pick out the numbers on the phone records she finds worthy of a closer look, and he could swear that he feels each decisive stroke of her highlighter reverberating in his own hand. 

By Christmas Cassie’s amusement with the suggestive comments about her sexuality has faded away, and her annoyance is reaching its boiling point. She tells Rob she’s going to bring her muscled, jovial cousin Gerry as her date to the holiday party and do her best to make eyes at him all evening like they’re having mindblowing sex. He looks forward to her performance - Cassie assuming a simpering persona will, he assumes, be a sight to behold - but he feels a flicker of disappointment as he realizes that she’ll be too occupied with her charade to spend much time with him. 

She appears at the party in a dress that has heads turning and Rob’s own head feeling unfocused and woolly for a few disorienting seconds. He’s only ever seen Cassie in her work clothes and her post-shift uniform (combats, t-shirts that are plain or emblazoned with cheeky slogans; a pair of sweatpants he’s seen her wear once or twice). The dress is doing the things it’s supposed to do, cinching tight to her waist to make her hips look wider and leaving lots of smooth, toned leg exposed. Its neckline hugs tight to her cleavage, dipping a bit between her breasts. 

He saw the edge of Cassie’s bra once, the underwire, when she lifted her shirt to show him the scar from her stab wound. He was surprised by her, both by her history in Undercover and the unthinking way she pulled the hem of her shirt upward. She’s leaned across him before, bent over, and he caught a glimpse of pale pink bra. Then, too, he’d focused on a single reaction: surprise. Cassie didn’t strike him as someone who bought pink, lacy things. Now, he orders himself to do the same, to be mildly startled that Maddox owns a dress like that, that she cleans up so well. 

Cassie is pretty. Rob knew it when he met her, and he knows it now. She’s also a thousand other things that are more interesting to him. 

“Sweetie,” Cassie coos at Gerry when they’ve made their way to Rob. She’s laying it on thick, but apparently not thick enough to prompt any suspicion in a room full of detectives. “This is my partner, Rob Ryan. Hi,” she adds. She smiles at him, her lips a dusky, shiny pink. It’s her real smile, not her coy one. 

“Hi, Maddox,” he says, smiling back, and extends a hand to Gerry.

“Great to finally meet you,” Gerry says, giving Rob’s hand a solid shake. There’s something just a little frantic about his expression, and he shoots Cassie a questioning glance. 

“I know,” Rob says lowly, before she can offer reassurance. 

“Oh, thank Jesus,” Gerry breathes in a similarly low tone. He extracts Cassie’s hand from the crook of his arm gently and reaches into his jacket for a handkerchief, which he uses to mop his brow. “I’m sweating.” 

“We’ll get you a drink,” she says, giving his chest a pat. “On the rocks. Try and have fun tonight, yeah?” she asks Rob. 

“Not as much fun as you,” he says with a raised eyebrow, lifting his glass in a toast to her. 

“I set a high standard,” she says breezily, tucking her arm through Gerry’s again. “Catch up later?” 

“Yeah,” Rob agrees, and watches them move toward the bar. A couple wisps of hair have slipped free of Cassie’s complicated hairstyle, and that makes him feel warm, warmer even than the alcohol burning down his throat as he finishes off his drink. Cassie can put on a flawless facade, she can fool everyone, even their gaffer, but those wisps of hair - those wisps of hair tell Rob a fundamental truth, one he can sink his teeth into, taste on his tongue.

Underneath it all, at her realest point, is the Cassie that Rob knows.

Underneath it all, she’s his partner.

The morning after the party they go for breakfast, a fry-up, Cassie’s eyes sparkling a she slathers butter on her toast and tells him about all the stunned looks she got. She’s back in her normal attire, jeans and jumper. There is a dusting of snow on the curls her hat doesn’t cover, and she keeps kicking his shin, thinking it’s a table leg. 

Eventually, she must get tired of him wincing, because she lifts her leg off the floor and rests her ankle on his knee, not missing a beat in her description of O’Kelly’s face.

Rob says, simply, “Your shoe is wet,” and she chews at him with her mouth open to let him know exactly what she thinks of that complaint, and Rob leaves breakfast with one damp thigh. 

Word of some sort makes its way around - either that, contrary to the popular belief of the force’s imbeciles, Murder’s only female detective is not a lesbian, or that Murder’s only female detective showed up to the Christmas party in what Rob’s heard referred to in whispers as a fuck-me dress, or perhaps, most likely, some mix of both - and he sees the way Cassie starts catching certain pairs of eyes in a way she didn’t before. Rob’s height and his possession of a dick mean that people usually look at him first and Cassie as an afterthought, but some detectives start to find Cassie much more quickly, Rob’s dick suddenly much less important than Cassie’s heterosexual breasts. 

They’ve just finished up target practice at the firing range when a guy from Fraud - whose name, if Rob’s recognized him correctly, is also Ryan - makes his move. He saunters up to Cassie, rubbing one of his arms so that the size of his biceps won’t be missed. 

“Detective… Maddox, right?” he asks. 

She looks up from cleaning her gun. “That’s me.”

“Detective Ryan,” he says, touching a hand to his chest. “Connor.”

“Cassie.” 

Connor grins, no doubt imagining how nice _Connor & Cassie_ will look on their wedding invitations. “You’re good with that,” he says, nodding to her gun. He does not, to his credit, add _for a woman._

“With this?” she asks guilelessly. She joins her thumb and forefinger in a circle and runs them down the barrel, capitalizing on the gun’s phallic shape so blatantly that Connor is forced to swallow hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Rob knows she’s playing, but he can’t pinpoint her goal, can’t tell if she’s toying with Connor for fun or if she legitimately wants to see if he can keep up with her. 

“Yeah,” Connor manages to say, dragging his eyes back up to Cassie’s face. “You come here a lot?” 

She shrugs. “Now and then.”

“You know,” Connor says, and god help him, he looks shy about it, “next time you’re here, or even today, if you’re not too busy - ”

Rob steps up next to Cassie, his foot nearly touching hers, and opens his locker with a _clang_. He rummages around in it noisily and says, “Pint at Handrahan’s, Maddox?” as if Connor’s not even there. 

“Yeah, sounds good,” Cassie replies. “You’re buying.” She’s still looking at Connor curiously, waiting for him to finish his sentence. 

He looks at Rob, back at Cassie, and then at Rob one more time. His biceps seem to deflate. “Nice to talk to you,” he says, and retreats to the other side of the locker room before Cassie can reply. 

She opens her own locker and glances at Rob. “Food, too,” she says. “I’m starving.”

“You’re always starving.” 

“Then you should be used to it by now,” she says sunnily, and pulls on her coat. 

On the walk to the pub, she studies the buildings they pass contemplatively and says, “I should marry him. We’d be Detectives Ryan and Ryan. It’d make O’Kelly mad.”

Rob breathes a quiet laugh toward the ground under their feet. “Think you’ll take him up on it if he tries to ask you out again?” 

Cassie shrugs. 

Suddenly and violently, Rob feels both apologetic and defiant, like a child who knows he’s done something wrong but still can’t believe he’s been caught. “You could’ve let him finish his pitch, you know.” 

Cassie’s tongue pokes into her cheek. “Oh,” she says. “Is that so? You’d give me your permission?” 

He deflates nearly as quickly as Connor had, and hates himself for it. “Cass, no,” he sighs. “That’s not what I - ”

Her elbows jabs against his ribs. “Teasing,” she says, giving him a funny look, a searching one. “We wouldn’t be partners if you were the kind of twat who thought you could tell me what to do.” 

A wry smile tugs the corners of Rob’s mouth upward. “I know.”

Cassie nods. “Lucky for you,” she says, “you’re a different kind of twat,” and she ducks away from the hand he extends to ruffle her hair, laughing.

They pull their first kid a few months into their partnership. A girl, all the promise in her small body stolen away by unfathomable, monstrous cruelty. Rob steels himself for the sight of the body, but still, it hurts. Her chubby bare toes seem too delicate to even dream of touching. Her little discarded trainer has a cartoon princess on its side and blood on its velcro fasteners. He hears it, how Cassie stops breathing. 

The tech who brought them to her is watching them solemnly. “I don’t have to show you the wounds,” he says quietly. When Rob tears his eyes from the little girl, he finds that the tech has glued his sorrowful gaze to Cassie’s face. “There’ll be a report for yous - ”

“Show us,” Cassie says. Her lips have lost some of their colour. 

“Detective Maddox,” the tech says, clearly facing some sort of battle between his professionalism and a misplaced instinct to protect. Detective or not, he doesn’t want a pretty woman like Cassie, with those lively, bouncing curls, to see something so dreadful. “It’s alright if - ”

Cassie shoots him a dark look, scowling. “Show. Us.” 

He nods, and hurries off to get them masks so they can lean down closer to the body. Rob’s whole body is experiencing a low-level vibration, but when he looks at his hands, they’re still and steady. He can feel Cassie looking at him, appraising him, but she doesn’t ask if he’s alright, for which he’s grateful. 

Cassie won’t turn her back to this. She’ll crouch down and look right into that still, once-sweet face, and let that moment carry her through the investigation, until she’s got cuffs on the bastard and a signed confession. He’ll do the same. 

“D’you have gloves?” she asks him, respectfully soft-voiced. 

Rob nods, frowning faintly at her. Cassie wears small nitrile gloves; he wears size large. His gloves are too big to be any good to her. But she reaches over before he can say as much, sticks her hand into his pocket, presses her palm flat against his stomach through coat lining and button-down and undershirt. 

“Cass,” he says, so quietly it’s barely a word at all, just a shape his mouth makes. 

She looks at him for a long moment, her eyes deep and woeful. “Thanks,” she finally says, pulling her hand and two gloves out of his pocket. 

When the tech returns with masks, she moves toward the body first. Rob is ashamed, but he’s grateful for that, too. 

They work a full twenty-four hours on that case, midnight to midnight, throwing coffee down their throats absently. The air in Murder is thick, like it always is when there’s a dead child, everyone’s bodies slicing through it urgently, moving from task to task. Rob forgets to eat until, some point in the late afternoon, Cassie shoves a crisp into his mouth. 

O’Kelly sends them home eventually, telling them firmly that they won’t be any good to anyone without a few hours’ kip. Rob drives them both to Cassie’s flat on autopilot, files spilling over the backseat. They open a bottle of wine, settle on her sofa, and keep working. 

It all catches up to them sometime close to four o’clock. There’s a single lamp on, and Rob’s eyelids are growing heavy, but he keeps reading determinedly through the family’s account of their movements through the day and evening. 

Cassie makes an exasperated noise from the other side of the sofa, tosses the file she’s holding onto the trunk she uses as a table and rubs at her eyes. “We have to sleep,” she says regretfully. “We can go back in at eight; let’s at least get a couple hours."

Rob nods, but he keeps the folder he’s reading through open. He knows she’s right, but he doesn’t want to stop. 

She reaches over, rests a hand gently against his thigh. “You can stay here. Just a couple hours sleep, then we’ll get back to it.” 

“Stay here?” Rob echoes. He’s so tired he wonders if he imagined her saying it. 

“Yeah. You can sleep here - ” She gives the sofa a pat, “If that’s alright with you. I’ll get you a quilt.” 

“Yeah.” He sighs and gives into a yawn before finally setting his folder on the table, too. 

“Good,” Cassie says. Her hand presses into his thigh as she pushes herself up off the sofa.

While she’s in the bathroom, changing and doing whatever else Cassie does before she goes to bed, Rob takes off his shoes, and then his socks, which he tucks carefully into the shoes before setting them at the side of the sofa, where Cassie hopefully won’t trip on them. Then he waits. The air in her flat feels thick, too, and he can’t tell if it’s the case, or his exhaustion, or something else altogether. 

Cassie comes back with a knee-length t-shirt on over her work trousers. There’s a flamingo on the shirt, its design worn away in places from numerous wears and washes. “Take off your shirt, Rob,” she says on a soft, tired laugh. “I promise my modesty can survive it.” 

With the shadow of a sheepish smile, he does, his sleep-deprived fingers working clumsily at the buttons. He’s got a white v-neck t-shirt on underneath, so it’s hardly like he’s removed any clothing at all - but there’s still something strange about it, undressing at Cassie’s place. 

She perches on the edge of the futon and wiggles off her trousers, leaving them in a puddle on the floor that she kicks to one side. There’s something about that little shimmy of hers that warms his chest, which has felt cold since they got the call sheet. Cassie trusts him. It’s not just that she trusts him not to be sleazy, which he hopes she knows him well enough to do by now, but she trusts him to see this side of her, ugly giant flamingo t-shirt, bare feet on the floorboards, a brush tugged through her hair. 

He unbuckles his belt and pulls off his own trousers. Cassie looks at him with even eyes, not ogling but not avoiding, either. She waits until he sits back on the sofa and then tosses a quilt at him. It hits him in the face, and when he pushes it aside to frown at her, he gets a faint glimpse of that little sly smile of hers. 

“Night, Rob,” she says, laying down and pulling the duvet over her. 

“Goodnight, Cass.” 

She falls asleep before he does, slips into slumber with long, deep breaths, just the gentlest purr of a snore. Despite their small victim’s bloody trainer, despite the blood-filled trainers that linger in his memory, the smooth sound of her breathing lulls Rob to sleep. 

The child’s mother identifies her body, button nose and round cheeks turning waxy and grey, and then sinks to the floor, beating fists against the threadbare carpet. Rob knows there’s no way to get used to those sounds, the unearthly ones that erupt out of mouths stretched wide with the kind of grief so profound and terrible it cannot even be named. The family gathers her up, tears streaked down all of their faces, death staring them down, merciless and unshakable. 

Cassie paces the halls of the morgue for several minutes after they’re gone, chewing at a thumbnail. Rob leans against a wall and listens to the occasional squeak of her shoes on the recently-mopped floor. When she comes a stop, at last, she faces him with her shoulders squared like she’s ready for a fight. 

“She’s hiding something,” Cassie says, her voice low like she doesn’t want what she’s saying to be true. “The mother.” 

Rob examines her face. Her expression is resolute, if regretful. She saw something that he didn’t see; whatever it was, it lead her here. 

“If you’re wrong…” he says slowly. If she’s wrong, and they accuse a grieving mother of involvement in her child’s murder, the media will come after them like starving dogs and O’Kelly will have their heads on spikes, and they’ll know that they deserve it. 

“I know,” she says. “I know.” She’s got her hand in her pocket, fiddling with her pack of smokes. “I can take it to the gaffer by myself, if you want.”

“No,” Rob says, pushing away from the wall, moving closer to her. “No, Cass…” He puts a hand on her shoulder and ducks his head so that he can meet her serious, unflinching eyes. “If you’re sure, then I believe you. We’ll look into it together.”

She touches the forearm attached to the hand he’s resting against her shoulder. “I don’t want to be right,” she says, and there’s a subtle, quaking undercurrent to her words that stabs toward Rob’s heart. 

“I know,” he says. “But you think you are.” 

Cassie nods, and the look on her face makes him ache. “It’s alright, Cass,” he says, and he slides his hand around her back, to her other shoulder, and tugs her into a hug. “It’s alright.” 

Her breath is hot and shaky against the front of his shirt. She fits nicely in his hold, her forehead against his heart, and her hands slide under his suit coat when she wraps her arms around him. “It’s not alright,” she whispers. “Her little toes.” 

Rob sighs heavily and tucks his face down against her head, lets his lips rest on her hair.

They get a solve in six days. With the murderer in a cell and the paperwork submitted to O’Kelly, they slump away from Dublin Castle, disheveled and red-eyed. It’s a solve, but it’s not a celebration. 

“My place?” Cassie asks blearily, blinking up at the sky like she’d forgotten it was blue. 

“Yeah.” Rob gives her a nudge toward his Land Rover. “Leave the vespa. I’ll drive.”

At her flat he wrestles his tie off like it’s choking him, and Cassie pulls her jumper up over her head with the same kind of desperate haste. Her shirt rides up beneath it and he catches sight of the scar at her ribs. Thirty stitches, she’d told him. Rob’s fingers twitch with the urge to touch it, to feel tangible evidence that things can be sewn back together. 

Cassie pours them each a glass of brandy and they collapse on her sofa, her feet landing in his lap, as has become her habit. He traces his index finger idly up and down the arch of one foot. There is a hole in the heel of her sock. 

“Ryan,” she says, her glass held close to her chest. “Good work.” 

He knows she means both _good police work_ and _good work handling a case like that_. Squeezing her foot, he says, “You too.” He kneads his thumb into the ball of her foot, listens to her sigh at the sensation, then asks, “How’d you know, Cass? About the mother.” 

“I just…” She rolls her lips together. “It was just nagging at me.” She looks at him over the rim of her glass. “Something about her reminded me of a case study I read once. At Trinity.” 

Rob drops his chin in a slow nod. He lets her words settle into the air in the flat for a beat, then asks, “Why didn’t you finish, Cassie?” It’s not the first time he’s expressed curiosity regarding her departure from Trinity, but she always gives him a non-answer.

She gives him these big earnest eyes, all solemn, and he thinks she might be about to tell him the truth, about to give him a new piece of well-guarded Cassie trivia that he’ll tuck away gently with all the others in a tender corner of his mind. 

“Because, Rob,” she says in a hushed voice. “Because the universe needed me here… to tell you when your theories are absolute shite.”

The grin that cracks across her face is so beautiful, so effervescent, that it turns the sound of his laughter strange, like it’s been strung tightly in his throat, waiting for its chance to be free.

In the squad room, full of the distinct sounds of its energy, voices on phones, papers shuffling in boxes, the printer whirring to life, a quiet curse when coffee is spilled, Rob waits for the system to pull up the past offenses of their current suspect while Cassie talks to O’Neill. 

They must have run into each other on their coffee runs; they’re both carrying mugs. O’Neill’s smiling at Cassie - he’s easy with his smiles, unlike Rob, doles them out like he has an infinite supply. Cassie smiles easily too, but she’s got a whole array of smiles, ranging from _you can fuck off now_ to genuine joy. She’s not giving O’Neill her fuck-off smile, nor is she giving him the sincere, professional one she typically directs toward the members of the squad she likes and respects. She’s not even giving him her friendly smile, not exactly. There’s something more there, in the way she looks down when she laughs and then back up at O’Neill out of the corner of her eye.

Rob prints the past arrest reports, grabs his folder of crime scene photos, and strides across the squad room. He stops right by Cassie, close enough that his chest touches her shoulder, and extends his arm behind her so that it rests very lightly against her lower back and the file in his hand is at her waist. “The uniforms brought Malcolm in. He’s in interview room two.” 

He never gets this close to Cassie in the squad room, uninterested in inspiring any fresh gossip, but he can justify it all, he can. They’re partners; what he says is for her ears only, and he needs to get close enough for that confidentiality. His arm across her back, that’s a guiding gesture, one that says _come on, let’s go_. The way that file in his hand taps against her hip, it’s a prompt, and a reassurance, a gesture of partnership: _we’ve got him here; let’s get him for good._ It might look like he’s got an arm around her small waist, but he doesn’t, not really. 

“Great,” Cassie says, looking up and over at him. They’re close enough that Rob could count her eyelashes, if he had the time. 

O’Neill lifts a hand in a casual wave. “Later, lads,” he says, and steps away.

His desk is only a couple feet away - he can still see Rob and Cassie from it, easily. Rob drops the arm that’s around Cassie and uses his other hand to lift a section of her hair out of the collar of her blazer.

“Thanks,” she says, reaching up to touch her hair, running her fingers through it quickly. “Should we go? You’ve got the photos?” 

He holds up his folder, grabs the arrest reports from the printer, and they’re off. 

At the door of the interview room, Cassie stills his hand on the doorknob, covering it with one of hers. “Alright?” she checks with him, soft and quick. Her eyes are searching his. 

“Yeah,” he assures her. He gives her a fast smile - he’s never easy with them, except around her - and watches her decide to believe him. 

Off duty on a weekend evening, they go for a pint. Cassie’s got something on her lips that makes them look particularly rosy and jeans that fit so snugly it’s like they were made with only her body in mind. Rob wonders if the other detectives on their squad would relish the opportunity to spend time away from their partners, to see their mates or take their wives to dinner. He and Cassie have a habit of assuming they’ll be spending their time together, whether they’re working or not. 

They sit at the bar and speak close to one another’s ears in order to be heard. When Cassie laughs, Rob feels the burst of her breath on his jaw. She rests her chin in her hand as she tells him, animatedly, about chasing her cousin’s runaway dog all through a small town in France, how for two days in her childhood she felt like a detective, felt like she could save the day.

Over her shoulder Rob can see a drunk guy with a rugby player’s body eyeing Cassie like a piece of meat. It’s almost always Cassie’s buoyant energy that does it, that snags men’s attention and reels them in, and the way she’s laughing at her younger self turns her vibrant, eye-catching. 

Obviously aware that Rob sees him, the man just keeps on looking, eyes on Cassie’s arse perched on her barstool, and Rob finds himself so suddenly and acutely disinterested with where the night might go if he doesn’t act to curb Mr Rugby’s interest sooner rather than later that he leans over while Cassie’s still talking and presses a kiss to the side of her head. Her hair smells, faintly, like peppermint tea.

Cassie’s body doesn’t react, but her eyes do, flashing surprise at him. She abandons her story and says, more quietly, “I can feel when someone’s undressing me with his eyes, Ryan.” The surprise fades from her eyes, replaced by irritation, like Rob’s disappointed her. “I can handle an arsehole if I need to. I’m a big girl.”

“I know, Maddox,” Rob says, keeping his tone casual. “But this is much easier for me than having to write up a report swearing backwards and forwards that yes, he needed your knee in his dick, and no, there were no other deescalating measures you might’ve taken.”

Her lips press together like she’s holding back a laugh, and the annoyance in her eyes dims until it’s gone. “Fair enough,” she says, and then surprises him, every bit as much as he’d surprised her, by scooting her stool closer to his, close enough that their thighs touch, and taking hold of his hand in order to pull his arm around her shoulders. She doesn’t let go of his hand but keeps ahold of it instead, tangling her fingers loosely, lazily, through his.

With her free hand, she reaches for his pint, brings it to her lips to finish what’s left of it, and sets the glass back down on the bar. “Another?” she asks. When she turns his face toward his, they’re close enough that just a fraction of movement would bring his nose in contact with hers. 

“Yeah,” he says, and lifts his hand to get the bartender’s attention. 

On the rim of his empty pint glass, the smudges left by their mouths overlap. 

They throw themselves into every case that ends up in their hands with a determination that’s near savage, giving their victims the only things left to give: answers, justice, perhaps a shred of peace. Rob knows - and he knows Cassie does, too - that there are always going to be cases that refuse to be pinned down and pulled apart, cases that give nothing away, murderers who manage through sheer, dumb luck to bury each of their sins so deeply that not even the most thorough excavation will unearth them.

Still: their first case that stretches weeks without a single valuable clue, it stings. The evidence, if it can be labelled as such, is useless. The still, ever-silent body gives nothing away. There are no witnesses. The only family member they can find is a half-sister in Istanbul, whose alibi checks out. It turns both Rob and Cassie tetchy, mostly with everyone else, but sometimes even with each other.

“We’ll all got unsolveds,” Sam O’Neill tells them kindly, his hand resting briefly against the backrest of Cassie’s chair, but the shape of his mouth says that he knows how that first feeling of failure burrows under your skin. 

“Thanks, Sam,” Cassie says, without looking away from her computer screen, where a zoomed-in photograph of the victim’s face somehow manages to stare back at her, even from beneath closed eyelids. 

O’Kelly calls them into his office and they give him a summary of every single lead, every single resulting dead end. Rob sits, but Cassie leans against the wall by the door, shifting her weight every few minutes, like she refuses to stay in that room for a second longer than O’Kelly demands. 

She brings files home with her that night, unwilling to let it go. By the end of the week they’ll have to acknowledge that there is nothing left for them to do, but Cassie won’t put those files into a box for Cold Cases until she absolutely has to. 

On the sofa she plonks her feet into Rob’s lap, and he runs his fingers over her delicate bones. When she’s in a better mood, she’ll poke her big toe into his stomach when he offers up a devil’s advocate protest against her latest theory, and yelp when he tickles the soles of her feet in retaliation. That night, he peels off her socks and rubs her arches and her heels, taps a quiet tattoo against the point of her anklebone, and waits for her to read the files one last time. 

Cassie sets the files down eventually with a long sigh. She rests her palm against the stack of folders for a moment and then draws both hands to her chest, uses them to pull the blanket around her shoulders tighter to her body. 

“We tried everything,” Rob tells her. 

“It doesn’t feel like enough.” 

She looks ragged, and that hurts him at some point so deep inside his body he can’t name it. He wants to pull her head against his shoulder, run his fingers through her tangled curls, feel her body give in, with stubborn slowness, to the comfort. He skims his knuckles up her calf and sets his hand on her knee. “I know.”

She sighs again, and drops the blanket from her shoulders, pulls her feet out of his lap and tucks her legs beneath her. “C’mon,” she says, waving a hand at his feet. “Switch.” 

Rob swings his legs up onto the sofa and rests his feet in her lap. Her thighs are warm, and the denim of her jeans is soft, worn-in. Cassie rubs his feet with a little crease of concentration between her eyebrows, her thumbs pressing into the sole of one foot with a dedicated kind of resolve, like she wants to make sure that every step he takes once she’s done with him is better than every one that preceded it. 

There’s a place they like to stop for burgers on busy days, as much sustenance as possible in a short amount of time, where the waiter has a crush on Cassie. It gave Rob a quaint kind of amusement at first - he’s at least five years younger than Cassie, the waiter, but she’s got one of those faces it’s hard to pin an age on - but eventually, as they’re chewing quickly after a victim’s funeral they attended both out of respect and to check if anyone was behaving suspiciously, the amusement goes up in smoke and Rob can see the eager kid as nothing more than a fly buzzing persistently at the edges of their conversation, giving Cassie extra chips with her burger, making sure her cup of coffee is never empty.

When the kid passes by for the third time, giving Cassie in her black funeral dress a bright smile, Rob has had enough. He reaches his hand across the table and catches a lock of Cassie’s hair between two fingers, pushes it back behind her ear. He feels a flare of satisfaction as the waiter’s eyes flick away quickly, the smile dropping from his face. 

“You’re going to get grease in your hair,” Rob tells his partner. She quirks an eyebrow at him - _so what?_ \- but grabs a napkin and swipes at her cheek nonetheless. It’s easier to breathe without the waiter hovering around, with Cassie’s unguarded, steadfast eyes resting on his face.

He bumps his knee against hers beneath the table and then says, without having any inkling that the words were going to come out of his mouth: “I’m having dinner with my parents next week.” He can only say no to the thread of pain in his mother’s voice so many times, but he’s dreading it; every time he sees his parents he feels small and lost and angry, and those feelings always coagulate into bitter bile that coats his throat by the time his mother slides his dessert tentatively in front of him. He tries to use his tongue to dislodge a stubborn piece of lettuce stuck between his teeth. “Will you come?”

Through a mouthful of chips, as effortlessly if he’d asked if she wanted sugar in her coffee, Cassie says, “Sure.” 

Latest case solved, the whole world feeling conquerable, lost in those blissful moments before the next crime cracks the luminous veneer of triumph, Rob looks up from the files he’s sorting into boxes to store downstairs and sees Cassie talking to Sam. 

They’re laughing, not loud enough to be heard but enough that Rob can see it on their faces. O’Neill gives Cassie’s upper arm a light, quick tap with the back of his hand when she says something cheeky - playful but still appropriate, colleague to colleague. Cassie tilts her head, still talking, and Rob knows that she’s not being a brat, knows that she’s giving Sam her genuine, teasing silliness, the stuff that can illuminate you from the inside out, make your day start to shimmer. 

She’s giving Sam her real smile, crinkled nose and all. 

Rob can’t keep watching; he pushes away from his desk and up to his feet abruptly. He needs a smoke, a coffee, a breath of air. The edges of his vision are swimming. 

Cassie’s eyes dart across the room and fasten on him right away. Those are his partner’s eyes, that’s his partner’s intuition, attentive to his movements like she can feel them in her own limbs. She says something else to O’Neill, who nods at her as he replies, and then Cassie’s moving across the room, straight toward him, her footsteps quick and bouncing. 

The ferocious, rapid-fire _thud-thud-thud_ of Rob’s heart slows down. He blinks, and the haze is gone, the squad room coming back into focus. 

“Smoke?” he asks Cassie. His voice sounds strangled in his throat, strained like someone’s been standing on his windpipe. 

She nods, moving in the direction of the stairwell without stopping. They’re not even out of the squad room when he feels her hand in his coat pocket, rummaging for cigarettes. 

On the ground floor, the windows cut into the doors are granting light entrance to the building, streaming bursts of it painting the hall gold, giving Murder the kind of glow it doesn’t deserve. Cassie’s got one of his cigarettes between her lips, impatient to light it, and her steps are synchronized with his, even though he’s got longer legs. 

The sun is bright enough that when they push open the doors, it’s blinding. Rob turns his head away and his squinting eyes find Cassie, her own eyes squeezed temporarily shut, and she freezes for him in that instant, her face sunshine-yellow, entrancing, immaculate; the only thing he can see. 

tbc.


	2. Cassie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No graphic descriptions, but more mentions of things detectives deal with in this chapter, specifically rape and murder.

_you’re the only friend i need_  
_sharing beds like little kids_  
_laughing ’til our ribs gets tough_  
_but that will never be enough_

\- lorde, “ribs”

The thing, Cassie learns, only one or two months into her fledgling partnership with Rob, is that when you have a partner who’s conventionally attractive, and _especially_ when you get along with that partner in an organic, uncomplicated way that most people seem to believe is impossible between heterosexual men and women, that partner becomes an ace up your sleeve.

Cassie’s twenty-eight. Twenty-eight is impressively young to be a detective on Dublin’s Murder squad, but in every other part of her life she’s told, over and over again, with everything from pity to genuine concern, in every way from directly to a tip-toeing implication, that twenty-eight is terribly, troublesomely old. Has she met a nice man yet? Has she heard that Cara’s friend Ellen’s nephew is single? Has she considered wearing more dresses, some lipstick? Has she thought about growing her hair longer? Has she tried meeting someone online? Are crime scenes the best places to be spending her valuable childbearing years?

Her friends' friends and her aunt’s friends and even Costello, the veteran detective who showed her the ropes in Murder and who frowned when she told him she didn’t have a husband (despite the fact that he seemed to honestly respect her work), they’re one thing. The men, who see a ringless finger, a hip unoccupied by a fussing baby, and immediately take her for trembling prey waiting to be captured or a piece of meat just desperate to be devoured - the men are another thing altogether. 

But in spite of the difference in the flavours of pushy she gets from her Aunt Louisa’s friends with their fluttery hands and the drunk men in pubs whose hands look to find purchase on her body without permission, the solution, the thing that stalls hand mid-flutter or mid-grope, turns out to be the same. 

When you have a conventionally attractive partner, tall and lanky in just the right way, sharp eyes, strong hands, all it takes is a small, shy bite on the inside of your cheek, a quick tentative glance at the person in front of you to check that surely, of course, they can be trusted with your heart’s deepest secret, a girlie little simper and two magic words, followed by a leading ellipsis: “My partner… ”

It works, without fail. It works like a charm.

She noticed Rob on her first day on Murder, of course she did. He’s impossible to miss, with his height and the way he carries himself, emanating a quality that might be mistaken for arrogance but that Cassie knew, instinctively, was something else. But her noticing of him hadn’t felt like anything monumental; she didn’t look at him and think _you, you’re for me_ , or anything close to it. She registered him as a member of her new squad, nothing more. 

But then that day in the rain, the window of his Land Rover sliding down and revealing his face; raindrops on his forehead, running down the sides of his nose, their hands wet and slippery over each other’s on the vespa’s handlebars, her irritated hands-to-heart performance of helpless femininity when he’d scoffed _girls_ at her attempt to explain the usual trick to getting it started. The grin on his face; she’s almost certain it was the first time she really saw Rob smile. Climbing into the passenger seat of his car, dripping wet, the music playing so softly she couldn’t make out the lyrics. The towel she tossed at his head at her flat so he could dry his hair. 

Something was forged between them that night, over the simple pasta dinner and hot whiskey and the pauses in conversation that they sunk into comfortably. On the sofa Cassie drew her legs to her chest and rested her chin against a kneecap and watched Rob’s hands gesture as he spoke, watched his hair dry into soft, boyish tufts, so different than the smartly-slicked style he sported at work. 

She never thought _you’re for me_ , not even the next day in the squad room, but maybe she felt it in some uncharted place in her body, because her eyes sought him out when she walked through the door, and found his eyes looking straight back at her. 

“Such a grim job, Cassandra,” Aunt Louisa says, watching Cassie demolish a second plateful of food at dinner. She’s got her index finger propped against her chin in a way that means she’s thinking seriously. 

“It needs to be done,” Cassie says, setting her fork down. “And I’m good at it.” 

“I’m sure you are, dear,” Aunt Louisa replies. She’s probably already thinking about her evening after Cassie leaves: washing up, setting dishes and silverware back neatly in their places, settling into her floral-patterned chair, Debussy’s _Nocturnes_ playing quietly, the spine of a novel that features a woman falling in love and stops short of a single hint of erotic pleasure cracking open in her hands. “But is it any way to live? All that sadness, all that harm, all those… ” A delicate little shudder. “Bodies.” 

“I don’t spend all my time at work, Aunt Louisa,” Cassie says in her most mollifying voice. 

“Don’t you?” Louisa’s eyes have sharpened on Cassie’s face. Ever since Cassie started at Templemore, her aunt’s been giving her these overwrought looks, like Cassie’s career choice is a reflection of her own bad choices as a surrogate parent. Cassie can practically feel her wondering if two chats with a priest weren't quite enough to sort out the psyche of a five-year-old who lost both parents in an instant. 

“I’m just fine,” she promises. 

“A young woman needs friends.” One of Louisa’s eyebrows ticks up a suggestive notch. “ _Suitors_. Being alone all the time - ”

“I’m not,” Cassie says, still patient, still soothing. “I have friends. And I have a partner on the squad; I’m almost never alone.” 

“A partner,” Louisa repeats. She looks like she might be close to concluding her investigation into Cassie’s life, close to breaking out the chocolate biscuits and offering a goodbye hug.

Cassie nods. “We get along well, and not just at work - we’re mates.” 

“And what is her name?”

“His name,” Cassie corrects. “Rob.” She doesn’t know when his name started filling her mouth like that, coating her tongue, pressing into her cheeks, brimming as intensely along her lips as a caution delivered to a suspect who’s just about to break. 

“ _His_ ,” Louisa echoes, with great significance. 

She gets up, and rummages around in the cupboard for the biscuits.

Cassie knows that her aunt isn’t the only one who imagines she’s romantically interested in Rob, but Louisa is probably the only one who’s thinking of bouquets of flowers on Cassie’s desk, cozy dinners where their ghastly job is forgotten and they feed one another tiramisu, chaste kisses and longing looks at the doorway of Cassie’s flat. The rest of the Cassie Fancies Rob Society is composed of a few of the lads on the squad, who are busy snickering about which cars from the pool Cassie’s given Rob blowjobs in, all those night shifts without O’Kelly around, nothing better to do than fuck on a desk. She sees their ugly grins, made all the more mindless by the way they believe themselves to be clever; sees them try to hassle Rob about it, just out of her earshot. 

Rob seems to handle it well: he looks at them like they’re not even worth seeing, dismisses them with a few words and, occasionally, the lazy lift of a middle finger. He doesn’t talk to her about it unless she asks. 

She supposes she should’ve expected it, being the fourth woman to ever make it onto the Murder squad, and one under thirty at that. But the predictability of it doesn’t make her aggravation any less profound. 

Walking down the halls that their feet are starting to navigate on autopilot, to their mutual private delight, she and Rob run into Colgan and Hastings, back from collecting an evidence-bagged murder weapon from the Bureau. Colgan smirks at them, like he always does, like he’s caught them at something more than existing in their workplace. 

“It took you three hours to collect a kitchen knife?” Rob asks in his most disdainful, drawling voice. Sometimes when they’re off duty and having conversations like students at university, developing sudden and passionate opinions about Edgar Allan Poe and Locke’s social contract and, absurdly, if Jack could’ve fit on that door with Rose in the freezing Atlantic ocean (Rob said no; Cassie scoffed at him and said he was ignoring reality in favour of some sort of romantic martyrdom), she can hear hints of the Dublin accent of his childhood slipping tenderly, covertly, back into his voice. Around suspects he knows are guilty or wankstains like Colgan he dislikes, the BBC in his accent emerges strongly: sharp, crisp, derisive. 

“Of course it didn’t, Ryan,” Cassie says, frowning at him like he’s being a dolt; that catches Colgan’s attention - trouble in paradise. “Surely,” she continues, “they stopped to suck each other’s cocks.” 

Colgan’s mouth drops open, indignant, and Hastings’ eyes go wide. Cassie and Rob carry on walking like the conversation never happened at all. Around the nearest corner, Rob presses a hand over her mouth so no one will hear the laughter that’s threatening to escape. 

She grins, her teeth pressed against his palm. It’s rare that Rob smiles with an open mouth, but there’s a myriad of crinkly lines around the crease of the smile on his mouth, laugh lines Cassie wants to count, to memorize, to keep. 

There are so many ways a life can go. Since she was five, Cassie’s known that, known about the infinite roadways that stretch out in front of every person, shifting, emerging and vanishing, with every breath and every step. Still: with each new victim, she remembers it acutely. 

She could’ve been in the car with her parents, a small, unmoving body on the roadside. She sometimes thought that once she’d done her Leaving Cert she’d move to France, get used to the lilting pronunciation of her name, drink wine every evening, maybe get a cat. When she was young she imagined moving far away, America or Australia, and couldn’t shake the feeling that, by some marvelous twist of fate, she’d get off the plane and her parents would be at arrivals, waiting for her, their smiles big enough to hurt her heart. For several years she thought she’d be a psychologist, and had even started to believe she could be good at it. She could have died from her stab wound, if Dealer Boy’s hand had been just a bit less shaky. 

So many ways a life can go. She wonders, but doesn’t ask, if Rob thinks the same things, leaning down close to a body, brows drawn in concentration and a mask held to his face. She wonders if he thinks of his young, unscarred body, inexplicably left in the woods, powerless to speak or to remember. She thinks sometimes that a brush or two with death makes a Murder detective, that the sweep of those raven's wings against your life teaches you things you could never learn at Templemore, things you could never discover in a forty-year career. 

Cassie looks at the middle-aged woman on the bedroom floor with blood from her head wound in her hair and lets herself imagine, just for an moment, all the paths that brought her to that floor, that wound, that death. 

The uniform at the door is starting to rustle with self-importance, and Cassie looks over to see Rob, who’d stepped out to answer O’Kelly’s phone call. “My partner,” she tells the uniform brusquely, uninterested in stroking his ego, and he slinks aside to let Rob pass. 

He joins her by the body, the slant of one of his eyebrows letting her know that the press has already gotten wind of the murder, which means their superintendent is in a mood. One corner of her mouth pulls upward, briefly, in acknowledgment. 

So many directions for a life, so many twists and turns and roads tread twice-over, and hers brought her here, to the harmonious crinkle of Rob’s white crime scene coverall suit alongside her own. 

“Is it worse,” Cassie muses around her cigarette, “to be shagging you, or to be a lesbian?” 

“To be a lesbian,” Rob says immediately. She doesn’t have to look at him to know precisely the wry smile he’s wearing. 

“Because you’re _that_ good,” she says skeptically. She turns toward him, leaning her shoulder against the stone wall, which has been warmed by the afternoon sun. “Oh, Rob,” she says, pulling her voice high up in her chest, making it breathy, “don’t make me wait any longer to find out. I can’t bear it. Every night I dream - ”

He cuts her off by reaching over and squeezing her nose briefly between the knuckles of his index and middle fingers. “Colgan’s not worth listening to, Maddox.” 

“I know that,” she says, because she does. She can give as good as she gets, if she has to, and Colgan has no idea how stubborn she is, but she’s just about had it with how he keeps trying to shove her into a box, fold her up all neatly. If she’s not screwing Rob then she must be into women; there _must_ be a reason, there simply must, that she has no interest in screwing _him_ , aside from the force-wide policy that forbids dating within squads and his detestable personality. 

“Cassie?” Rob says, and she realizes she’s staring at nothing as her cigarette burns itself out. 

She drops it, stomps her foot down on it. “I’m going to bring my cousin to the Christmas party.” At his inquiring look, she adds, “My male cousin. Never had a problem getting girls. Would pretend to be my boyfriend for the night, if I asked him to.”

Her eyes flicker over the planes of Rob’s face quickly, searching for his reaction. If he thinks it’s pathetic of her to do, bring in Gerry to get Colgan and his little mates to shut up, then it will crack something inside of her, send a shockwave of pain along the scar on her chest, but she’ll bear it. She wants Rob to understand, wants it more than she’s wanted anything in a long while, wants him to see that she’s not worn down by the badly-hidden sniggering and the tongues wagging at her between fingers in the shape of a V, but that she’s simply tolerated it for long enough, grown tired of it as a feature of her every day. 

He tosses the butt of his cigarette on the ground. “I thought you were done with Undercover, Detective Maddox,” he says, his eyebrows shifting upward the barest amount. 

The breath sweeps out of Cassie’s lungs, relief curling a smile onto her lips. “I’ve got another operation in me, yet.”

In her flat after the Christmas party, which Cassie’s been calling Operation Fuck Off in her head and which went, in her opinion, smashingly, she peels off her velvety knock-out dress and kicks it under her futon. She takes all the pins out of her hair in the bathroom, letting them clatter into a small pile by the sink, and washes off her makeup. Her bare face in her reflection looks young, younger than twenty-eight, somewhere closer to twenty-three, but there’s a little click in the joints of her hip sometimes when she’s been sitting for a long time that wasn’t there five years ago, and something heavier in her limbs, holding her more firmly to the ground. 

She rubs absently at the pressure mark left across her waist from the band of her sheer tights digging into her skin and thinks about Gerry on his way home to his wife. He seems happy and settled, talking about what colour to paint the sitting room and what flowers to plant in the garden and the kids he’ll have someday. Cassie tries to put herself in that kind of world, tries to place herself in a room, holding paint swatches against a wall, or in a garden dreaming of spring after spring in one place. She’s never pictured herself as someone’s wife or someone’s mother, and maybe that’s a decision in and of itself - but maybe it’s not. 

Tonight, though, is not the night to figure it out. She flicks off the light in the bathroom and makes her way to her futon, her footsteps a hair unsteady. She isn’t drunk, but she’s on the other side of tipsy. 

Under the duvet, her toes curled up tightly as she waits to get warm, she has the sharp and unexpected urge to call Rob. In the cocktail-induced mist of her mind, she feels the need to tell him about the wallpaper in the room she slept in at her aunt and uncle’s house as a child. It was dark, with flowers. The edges of it peeled. She didn’t mind those peeling edges, but her father would have. Her mother would’ve hated the flowers. She imagines telling Rob this, and tries to conjure up his face.

She falls asleep. 

Perched against the front of the car, smoking, Cassie fights against the urge to bounce her leg impatiently. They’re waiting for detectives from DV to show up, to open up their file of night upon night when their latest victim called to report her own assault at the hands of her husband. She knows DV can only do so much; in Murder the victims are stripped of their power to speak or their power to choose not to, but living victims have autonomy and detectives have to respect it. You can’t refuse someone the right to go home, no matter how bruised and broken they are. But she keeps seeing the face of the nine-year-old boy whose mother was dead and whose father was in handcuffs, and she can’t help her flare of anger over the fact that she and Rob were the detectives he saw, the detectives who arrived when the worst had already happened. 

“Cass,” Rob says. His cigarette dangles lazily between his fingers. “Don’t take their heads off.” 

She shoots him a sulky look. “I’d never.” 

“They probably feel like shit.” 

“Is this _empathy_ , Ryan?” she asks, assuming a shocked expression. “Are you feeling alright?” 

“You’re a brat.” He shoves at her shoulder lightly, then reaches around her, catches the slight sway of her body with his hand against her other shoulder, and pulls her closer to him. “Don’t make it worse for them. That’s all.” 

She wonders about what’s going on behind his eyes, if there’s a little boy lost somewhere inside of him who still tortures himself over his failure to save his friends. She nods and rests her hand, just for a second, against his knee. “I won’t.” 

The DV detectives arrive, and Rob’s right, they look wrecked, circles dark and deep beneath their eyes. The four of them sit down with their files in an unused interview room and create a timeline together. Their murdered woman never went to a shelter, the DV detectives tell them, despite all their efforts to persuade her. “She swore that he never touched the boy,” one of them, Dughan, says, and the intensity of his desperation to believe it is palpable, so Cassie nods at him. He gives her a small, sad smile in return. 

She and Rob walk the detectives from DV out. There is no small talk about plans for the weekend ahead, about the weather. Cassie watches Rob’s shoulder blades move under his suit jacket as he walks down the hall ahead of her. 

“Detective Maddox,” Dughan says abruptly, when they get close to the doors. “Can I have a word?” 

Rob glances over his shoulder. Cassie exchanges a tiny upward eyebrow quirk with him, then gives him a barely-perceptible nod. He carries on down the hall with Dughan’s partner. 

“Yeah?” she asks Dughan, rolling her shoulders back and looking up into his face. 

He smiles at her again, much less melancholy in it this time. Cassie has an unwelcome inkling of where this might be going. 

“I know this is a terrible time, sure,” he says, rubbing at his hair like a schoolboy, which is probably supposed to be charming. “But I’m not around here a lot, and… I was wondering, if after you get this case closed, I could buy you a drink?”

“Thanks,” Cassie says, “but no thanks.” 

Dughan blinks, apparently totally unprepared for that response. “Have you got a boyfriend?” he asks. 

She’s beginning to wish she’d laid into him about the woman he’d failed to help. She hates men who only leave women alone when they learn that they’re _taken_ , claimed by some other man, whose territory they have to respect. She hates herself whenever she has to play that game, to say yeah, she’s got a boyfriend, a big strong boyfriend who’s awfully protective, when an unrelenting arsehole won’t take any other form of no for an answer. She wants Dughan from DV to have enough sense to leave her alone, but she can tell that he doesn’t.

She thinks of her Aunt Louisa’s curious face. She thinks of Colgan’s lewd, repugnant grins, his uncreative single entendres. And she tilts her head as she looks at Dughan, gives her lashes a little flutter. 

“Not exactly,” she says, coy. “You seem like a really nice guy… I mean, you’re in DV and all,” she adds for good measure, and watches his chest puff out predictably. “It’s just…” She glances away, toward the doors, where Rob and Dughan’s partner are talking to Winters. “My partner,” she finally says, like it’s difficult to get the words out, and looks back into Dughan’s face with big, earnest, _oh-please-don’t-tell_ eyes. 

Dughan looks at Rob for a long moment, assessing. “Right,” he finally says. 

Cassie gives him her sunny-sweet smile. “Thanks for coming in.”

“Right,” he says again, and moves off down the hall alone. Cassie stays where she is, both impressed and irked by how well her rebuff worked. 

Dughan’s joined his partner again, and Rob is walking back toward her. She mouths _coffee_ at him, and he nods. He rubs his thumb against his fingers, the universal gesture for money, and points at her. Cassie laughs and shakes her head, and she’s got four good reasons why he should pay on the tip of her tongue by the time they fall into step. 

“Pint?” Rob asks when they’ve dropped their report off on O’Kelly’s desk. His office is a mess, but it’s a very precise mess, and Cassie always feels like a clumsy kid in an antiques store when she’s in it, tiptoeing around, keeping her elbows close to her body. 

She wrinkles her nose apologetically, shaking her head. “Meeting Emma and George for dinner.” 

“Right.” Rob loosens his tie. “Did she have the baby yet?”

“Next month.” Back at her desk, Cassie removes her stud earrings and trades them for a dangling silver pair. On impulse, she asks, “Do you want to come?” She suspects he doesn’t, but Rob has exactly one other friend, and even though she knows he’s not particularly social, sometimes she worries about him, hiding out in his room so Heather doesn’t start harassing him about mouldy cheese. 

Leaning against his own desk, one foot against his chair, he gives her an amused look. “I thought you said the last time you saw Emma she spent an hour talking about breast pumps.” 

“Mmhm.” She gives him her best guileless eyes. 

He laughs. “I’ll pass, Cassie. Thanks.” 

She shrugs, pulling out the clip that’s been holding her hair back. “Don’t say I never offered you anything, Ryan. What are you going to do tonight?”

Rob shrugs, and reaches over to pull free a strand of hair that’s tangled in her earring. “Read.” 

She breathes out a soft laugh. “Do you want to come over later? Em won’t want to stay out late.” 

“Sure.” He straightens from his desk. “Text me when you’re home.” He tips his head toward the nearest window. “I’ll drive you to dinner.” 

Cassie glances over and sees that the windowpane is coated with rain. “Jesus,” she huffs, then throws Rob a smile. “Thanks.” 

Emma and George, it turns out, have invited someone else, one of George’s friends called Jack. When Cassie walks into the restaurant they both look at her with unbearable enthusiasm, their eyes flicking hopefully from her to Jack. 

“Hi,” Cassie tells Jack when she slides into the seat next to him. They shake hands. She makes appropriately impressed noises about his job; he makes jovial, highly impressed sounds about hers. She gives him a polite smile, shoots Emma a look that says _seriously?_ , and tries to redirect the conversation toward the topic of the baby.

It works, but only briefly, and George manages to change the subject to his post-uni adventures in Australia with Jack, telling stories of mishaps and bragging about his mate getting them out of messy situations until the tips of Jack’s ears have gone red. 

When they’re finished their appetizers, George and Emma hurry off to the bar to get another round of drinks, even though Emma’s basically walking at a waddle and they could easily ask their waiter for a second round. Cassie watches them go with a small shake of her head, half amused and half annoyed.

“For what it’s worth,” Jack says, “I didn’t know this was a set-up either.”

“We’ve been duped,” Cassie says wryly. 

He smiles. He’s nice-enough looking, his eyes a bright green. “We have. But it’s still...been very nice to meet you, Cassie. I wouldn’t mind getting to know you better, without these two staring at us.” 

“Oh, I don’t know if I’m worthy of your attention,” she quips. “I’ve never saved Emma from a close call with a deadly spider.” 

Jack laughs. “I’m sure you’ve done plenty of interesting things. And between you and me, I don't think that spider was actually deadly.” 

Cassie gives him a small smile, bordering on apologetic. “I’m not really looking for a relationship.” 

He nods, shifting his fork on his empty plate. “Emma sort of implied you were, but… I guess that shouldn’t surprise me.” 

“I’m sorry,” Cassie says, because she genuinely is. Jack seems like a good guy, right down to the way he’s taking her rejection at face value, and now he’ll have to sit through the rest of this dinner while Cassie asks twenty different questions about class sizes in schools to keep Emma distracted from match-making. “That might be my fault, sort of,” she adds, though she’s not entirely sure why. “I haven’t told Em, but… I have a partner at work, and it’s…” She trails off, her shoulders rising and falling in a shrug. “It’s complicated.” 

Jack nods again and lifts his nearly-empty pint. “To complicated,” he says, like a man who’s experienced his own share of complicated on Dublin’s dating scene. Cassie touches her glass to his, and they drink. 

Rob comes over in jeans - a rare sight - and a plain white t-shirt that looks ready to be slept in, carrying a bottle of gin. He pours them each a glass, his back to Cassie, while she slips out of the day’s clothes and into a pair of sweatpants and a shirt baggy enough that she feels she can get away with taking off her bra. They curl into either corner of her sofa, like they always do, and she stretches her legs out so that her feet land in Rob’s lap. 

“Your feet stink,” he says matter-of-factly. Cassie sticks her tongue out at him, lifts a foot toward his face. He pushes it away, grimacing, and holds both of her feet still as he takes a drink. “How was dinner?”

She contemplates telling him about the set-up with Jack for a moment, but decides against it. “Good. How was your book?”

“I watched some reality thing with Heather.” His fingers hit the tightest point in the arch of Cassie’s foot, and she tips her head back, exhales long and slow. Rob’s thumb presses into her muscle, and the release of its tension is pure enough that it feels like it pulsates up her leg, along her calf and through her thigh. 

She slits her eyes open and finds Rob looking at her, watching her face with eyes so dark she can’t read the emotion in them. For a millisecond, the air in her flat feels electric, charged, and then it settles again, just a hint of a chill and filled with the quiet of the night. 

Rob tickles her. She squirms and laughs, the sound sudden and overly loud, and kicks at him. The gin in his glass spills onto her foot, turns her skin sticky. 

Their first child murder is a callous thing, so merciless it feels alive, like it’s chasing them through their days and nights. They work it hard, work themselves to the ground, and they get a solve. Rob sleeps on her sofa for every night of it, and Cassie keeps herself attuned to him, to all of the unintentional movements in his body, the nail that digs into the skin of his wrist so hard it leaves a mark, the little indent in the side of his face that means he’s biting his cheek. She watches Rob, and she chases down evidence, chases down links with an untamed kind of tenacity, and they survive it. 

The morning after, Rob asleep on her sofa again, quilt pushed to the floor and his arm flung over his face, her whole body feels stiff, her fingers cramped and curling, like she just dug her way out of the earth. She stretches out her fingers, and wakes Rob with a soft touch on the shoulder and a cup of coffee, and she thinks they’ve done it: they’ve made it through the worst thing. 

She’s so sure of it, that they’ve tackled the hardest kind of case there is and come out on the other side, that she’s thrown by the way her breathing halts, by the shiver that seizes her spine, by the nausea that makes the crime scene spin, when they pull their first murder victim who’s been raped. The scene is a mess, and their woman’s lifeless face still has evidence of her fight on it. Cassie wants to sink to her knees and apologize for not being there sooner. 

Rob touches her elbow on the pretext of wanting to move around her without throwing her off balance, and positions himself between her and the body. She wants to scream that she doesn’t need protecting, and she also wants to go home so badly that it hurts. By the time the uniforms have finished briefing them, she’s found her breath again and swallowed down her rising nausea. 

They work through the evening and into the night, gathering whatever information they can as they wait for Cooper to do his autopsy, setting up the incident room, assigning tasks to their floaters. Cassie takes her vespa home, speeding so that the wind stings her eyes, and Rob meets here there with a pizza. They eat quickly, planning out the next day between bites, Cassie scribbling a list of known contacts they’ll want to get in touch with, and then they throw what’s left of the pizza into her fridge and get ready to sleep. 

“Cass,” Rob says, when he’s stretched across her sofa and she’s bundled up in her duvet, her hand extended to turn off the bedside lamp. He shifts, propping himself up on an elbow. Her heart hammers out a couple violent beats. She doesn’t think she’s been off today; she thinks she pulled herself together decisively, furtively. 

“Yeah?” Her voice sounds small, delicate in the space between her futon and the sofa. 

“It’s been a shit day,” he says simply. 

She nods and flashes him her very best attempt at a smile. “Hazard of the job, yeah?” 

Rob nods, slowly, without taking his eyes off her face. “Goodnight, Maddox. Get some sleep.” 

“You too,” she says, and turns off the light.

Cassie falls asleep fairly quickly, like she always has, for as long as she can remember - and wakes up frantically in the smallest hours of the night, the duvet tangled between her legs, a shriek halfway out of her throat. For a sinister moment she doesn’t recognize her own flat, and then when she does, she sees him as she had in her dream, emerging from a shadowy corner, Iain Brady with his menacing, empty smile and his can’t-catch-me eyes, his voice terrible in its tenderness across her skin: _if I ever did break into your flat and rape you, I don’t think the charges would stick, do you?_ And no one would believe her when she tried to tell them: sneers at her from the lads on the squad, disgusted curl of O’Kelly’s upper lip, and Rob, _Rob_ -

Rob, right there, on the edge of her futon, “Cass, hey, _Cassie_ , it’s a dream, you’re alright,” and his hand on her hair, his hand rubbing her back, until she really sees him and she makes an awful, choking sound like someone about to be sick. 

“You’re okay,” he promises her, and he pulls her into his chest, into the cocoon of his arms, strong around her. She presses her face against his shirt and breathes in the smells of sleep and sweat off of him, her heartrate slowly settling back to its normal rhythm. “You’re alright.” When she nods into his chest he pulls back a bit, dips his head to look into her face, questions flickering through his eyes. “I’ll get you some water.” 

She reaches out when he starts to get up, grabs a handful of the fabric of his shirt and holds tight. She shakes her head. For an instant, she wants to pull him under the duvet with her and curl into him, have him hold her. She doesn’t want to be left by herself on the futon, untethered, the remnants of her nightmare waiting to take hold again. 

Rob nods at her, murmurs, "Okay," like he can hear the wild frenzy of her thoughts, and places one of his hands atop her fingers clenched over his shirt. He shuffles closer and wraps his other arm around her shoulders. A few seconds later, she feels him press a kiss into her hair. 

It must take twenty full minutes for her fingers to tire and her grip on his shirt to loosen, but he doesn’t move or speak, doesn’t rush her, just breathes with his body pressed against hers and waits. In the morning he takes his cues from her - peppy, determined, all systems go - and they don’t say a word about it. 

Cassie and Rob solve their rape-murder, pull a new case, solve that one too, and her equilibrium is restored. She turns cartwheels down the beach when they go for a walk on Sunday morning, laughs at the way he cringes when she tucks her sandy hand into the crook of his elbow, and feels peaceful and entrenched in her routine when she returns to Dublin Castle on Monday, her hair bouncing against her shoulders with every step. O’Neill holds the door open for her, says, “G’morning, Detective Maddox,” with one of his solid smiles, never leering, never presumptuous, always finding its way right into his eyes. 

“Good morning,” she says, and then turns so she’s walking backwards into the building and adds, “Sam. You can call me Cassie, you know.” 

He gives her a small, playful salute that makes her grin, and she turns on her heel and jogs up the stairs, setting out to find her partner.

It’s a Wednesday when Bernadette stops Cassie from breezing by the admin desk, letting her know that someone’s waiting to speak with her. It’s Martin Spalding, brother of the victim in the last case she and Rob worked. His appearance on one of the chairs across from Bernadette’s desk sends Cassie’s mind racing - did they miss something, did they get it wrong, did the family feel neglected during the investigation?

“Martin,” she says, pulling up a bright, shiny smile for him. “How are you doing?” 

“As well as can be expected,” he says, standing up briefly before she waves him back into his chair and takes a seat next to him. 

“Your parents?” she asks. 

“They’re… making it through. Day by day, right?” 

Cassie nods, head tilted sympathetically. “Right,” she agrees. 

Martin rubs his palms against his jeans. “I suppose you’re wondering what I’m doing here.” 

Instead of agreeing outright, Cassie says, “Would you like to speak in an interview room, or… ?”

“No,” he says quickly. “No. It’s nothing about my brother.” 

She manages to keep the surprise off her face. “Alright.” 

“I might be making an arse of myself,” he says, and wipes his hands on his thighs again; he’s nervous, Cassie realizes. “But I - you were so good to my family, Detective Maddox. You - may I call you Cassandra?”

“Cassie,” she says automatically, and hopes wholeheartedly that this conversation isn’t heading where she knows it is. 

“Cassie,” he repeats, smiling. “You were so good to my family, Cassie, my parents - you really helped my ma. I know it’s your job, I know that, but I… I still thought, what a rare thing to find in a person these days. And Mike - my brother always said I’m awful about letting things go when I shouldn’t. So I thought I shouldn’t.” He looks into her face, eyes heartfelt as can be, and reaches out with nearly excruciating hesitation, takes one of her hands between both of his. His palms are a bit clammy, despite his best efforts. “I had to ask, Cassie, if I could take you to dinner. Or for coffee. Or take you to see - ”

“Martin,” she says softly, putting a stop to a series of suggestions that she imagines might stretch on and on. She remembers him sobbing in this same building weeks ago, crumpled tissue pressed to his face, and remembers his mother, a small woman made smaller by loss, and his father, clearing his throat once a minute to keep from crying. She knows that they’re all still treading water in a particularly unforgiving corner of purgatory. 

“It’s really kind of you to ask,” she tells him. “Really. It’s just…” She throws a quick glance in the direction of the squad room, bites the inside of her cheek hard enough to hurt, and offers him a delicately balanced look, a simper that manages to also be somber. “It’s just - you’ve met my partner, right?” she asks, and gives him her widest eyes. 

It takes a moment, but Martin gets it, what she’s implying. He releases her hand, which she pulls back into her own lap, and leans back in his chair. “Yeah,” he says. “Detective Ryan. Right.” 

“It’s good to see you, Martin,” she says gently. “I'm glad you stopped by. We think of you, and your parents.”

He cringes minutely at the _we_. “Yeah.” He pushes his hands into his pockets and gets to his feet like the simple action takes all of his energy. “Thanks.”

Cassie gives her head a shake - nothing to thank her for- and gives him a friendly hug that she’s careful to keep short. “Take care,” she tells him earnestly, and watches him walk off with his shoulders slumped. The smile she was wearing for him has given way to a rueful frown; she hopes he'll be alright. 

When she goes into the squad room she finds Rob right inside the doors, poking at a yogurt with a spoon idly. He’s barely smiling, but there’s something wicked in it. “Morning, Cassie,” he says.

“Good morning,” she says, one eyebrow raised. She moves toward their desks; she can see a call sheet sitting on Rob’s.

He bins the yogurt and follows after her. “Did Martin Spalding just - ”

“Quiet, Ryan,” she says, picking up the call sheet and skimming it. “Where are we going?”

“Glasnevin,” Rob says easily, then: “He did. Martin Spalding just came here to ask you on a nice, boring little date.” 

Cassie slides him a look that might be all the more heated for the fact that she did, in a small private corner of her mind, consider that poor Martin’s version of courtship _would_ probably leave her feeling uninspired, even if her sense of ethics and her romantic disinterest in him didn’t already prevent her from saying yes. “We should head,” she says, pointedly ignoring Rob. 

“Oh, I don’t know, Cass,” he says, all pensive. “What if this victim has brothers? I should probably go on my own first, make sure they’re not liable to fall in love with you - ” 

“ _Bite_ me, Rob,” she says, grabbing up the call sheet and retracing her steps to the squad room doors. 

He’s right on her heel, like she knew he’d be. “Now, Maddox,” he says, his smile finally breaking all the way through. “You know that’s an inappropriate request for the workplace. I'm feeling objectified. I’ll have to tell O’Kelly, there’ll be a report - ” And Cassie rolls her eyes expansively and swats at him with the call sheet and wonders, as he keeps on slagging her, who else in the world ever sees this side of Rob, all the seriousness gone from his face, the bits that are left there just for show. 

Emma has her baby. Cassie goes to visit at the hospital, admires a small scrunched-up face and tiny grasping fingers, and that night, in her flat, she drinks her first glass of wine quickly and tells Rob, “It was terrifying.” 

“The baby was terrifying?” The amusement on his face is faint, warm; inquisitive rather than mocking. “Did it have an extra eye or hooves instead of feet?” 

“That responsibility,” Cassie says. Even now, it makes her feel breathless. “To be in charge, completely in charge, of keeping someone safe and well. In this world.” 

Rob’s hand lands on the juncture of her neck and shoulder, pressing gently into stiff muscles. He takes her empty glass from her hand and replaces it with his own, which still has a few mouthfuls in it. “Cassie,” he says, in a soft voice stripped bare in such a way that it almost makes her shiver. “Do you want to tell me what your nightmare was about?” 

She pulls her knees into her chest. Her bare feet feel chilled. “Not tonight,” she says quietly. 

He nods, and nudges the stem of her wine glass upward so that she’ll take the hint and lift it to her mouth, and gets to work kneading the knot out of her shoulder. 

She arrives in the squad room one afternoon and finds a box sitting on her desk with a slip of paper atop it that says it’s full of evidence that needs to be returned to Undercover. There’s a moment of irritation that makes her jaw clench tight. Cassie’s not a uniform, or a floater; she’s a murder detective, and she has better things to do with her days than make deliveries. But after that first flash of annoyance she forces herself to acknowledge that she _is_ still the newest member of the squad, which makes her the prime candidate for grunt work, and that Undercover material is sensitive and needs to be treated as such - and that her own prior stint in the squad means she understands that better than most. She texts Rob where she’s going and hauls the box into her arms. 

Undercover’s squad room, which only a third of the squad are ever working out of at any given moment, is on the sixth floor of a building, inaccessible by the lift - you have to get off on the fifth floor and find your way to the stairwell. Cassie greets the squad admin, Maggie, who tells her to leave the box with Wynne, which she goes into the squad room to do. Predictably, Wynne isn’t there, so Cassie sets the box on his desk and looks around for a paper and pen to leave a note. 

“Is it… Lexie?” a voice asks from behind her. 

She turns and sees a man, skinny and about her height, perched against someone else’s desk. “Cassie,” she says, and adds, “Lexie was my cover,” as she gives him a once-over. He’s wearing a singlet and a pair of tracksuit bottoms he doesn’t look quite comfortable in, and the tattoo on his forearm is fresh; he’s getting ready to go into an operation. “You are…?”

“They call me Fleas,” he says, straightening from the desk and extending a hand. 

She shakes, and asks, “New in the squad?” 

“Yeah. Mackey’s mentioned you before, that’s why I recognized you - sounds like you were his last pet.” 

Cassie grins, eyebrows lifting. “And you’re his new one?” 

“Lucky me,” he says breezily, and she can see it - that unknown ingredient in Frank Mackey’s blood, that thing Cassie knows lurks, to some extent, in her own veins. This man will do fine in Undercover. 

“When do you go in?” she asks. She can feel that fizz coming back into her body at the question. It’s intoxicating, and she shoves it away forcibly. 

“Week or two, they’re saying,” Fleas says casually. 

“Attrition,” Cassie says, like she’s giving advice. “Sedition.”

He smiles suddenly, a crinkled grin with warmth in it. “Depose the king.” 

Cassie smiles back, unable to help it. “Good luck.” 

“Yeah, thanks.” He leans against the desk once again, balances someone’s pen between two fingers. “You know, Cassie. I’d take your phone number, if you were after giving it out.” 

Her lips part slightly, but she doesn’t answer him, not right away. She guesses he must have seen it in her, their affinity, that elemental material Undercovers seem to share. And he must know that she understands how it would be, better than almost anyone else: she'll scrawl her number on his arm today, and it'll be middle-of-the-night calls on a burner phone, no pubs or restaurants or strolls through St Stephen’s Green, drinks and sex at his flat and getting a taxi two blocks away before the sun comes up, weeks and weeks without a word passing between them until her phone rings again. Part of Cassie thinks she might not mind it; it would be much different from her last relationship, with Aidan, in which she was a constant source of disappointment. But another part of her, a stronger part, drew a line between herself and Undercover when she left, and promised not to cross it. 

“I’m on Murder now,” she says. “I’ve got a heavy caseload, a partner… he and I keep pretty busy.”

Undercovers are notoriously hard to read, but Cassie’s got experience, and Fleas is new. When he doesn’t laugh and tell her to fuck off with her lame excuses, she waits for a hint in his body language, a recognition that he’s being brushed off, a barely-there tightening of the skin between his brows or a hand in his tracksuit bottoms’ pocket, fiddling with the inner seam. But there’s nothing: there’s just his placid Undercover face, giving absolutely nothing away. 

As she half-runs back down the stairs, she realizes what that placid face meant. Fleas believed her. An Undercover that young, presumably that good - he bought her veiled suggestion, hook, line, and sinker. She told him to assume she's screwing Rob, and he did it without a shred of doubt. 

She nearly trips and topples down the last few steps. Hand tight against the railing as she finds her balance again, there's a creeping sense of clarity she's not sure she wants to feel making its way to the front of her mind. 

Her phone rings, and she focuses every shred of attention on the way it buzzes in her palm as she fishes out of her pocket, makes a resolute choice to focus on this call and absolutely nothing else, and manages to answer, "Maddox," without even a sliver of a tremor in her voice. 

Two days into the Katy Devlin case, the Knocknaree woods at the edges of every moment, trees with towering, spindly branches and secrets, Cassie tells Rob to stay over even though it’s still early enough that the DART is running. He doesn’t protest, his grip on his empty glass white-knuckled. 

They brush their teeth together in her bathroom, side by side in front of her sink in their sleeping clothes, the hem of Cassie’s t-shirt brushing the tops of her knees, Rob’s boxers wrinkled and his t-shirt creased across the front. 

Her partner. She flicks her eyes in his direction as she brushes and her body throbs with how ferociously protective she feels of him. It expands through her chest, that feeling, and crawls up into her throat, steals her breath. She wishes she could smooth her thumbs over his eyelids and brush away the sadness in his irises; she wishes she could suck the sorrow out of the marrow of his bones and take it into her own heart. 

She switches her toothbrush to her left hand and takes his hand with her right. Rob’s fingers feel lifeless for a beat, and then the strength comes back into them, and they link through her own. She squeezes his hand and holds on like both their lives depend on it. 

They stay there for several lingering moments, their mouths still full of toothpaste. Cassie rests her cheek against Rob’s arm and meets his eyes on the mirror. 

She won’t let go until he does. 

tbc.


End file.
